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Death in Williamsburg: the massacre of indie band the Yellow Dogs that rocked New York's hipster paradise

Until three days ago the inspirational tale of the Yellow Dogs was one of art triumphing over oppression, creative expression trouncing control and fear — but now social media is gripped by a dark twist in their story. The guitar band from Iran — where playing rock music is an offence punishable by imprisonment — were making their mark on the competitive and cut-throat indie music scene in Brooklyn, New York.

The four members of the band, who sport the lustrous locks, skinny jeans and skateboards befitting their status and describe their sound as “dance-punk-psychedelic”, fled Iran three years ago and landed in East Williamsburg, a gritty part of Brooklyn.

They rented a relatively (by New York standards, at least) affordable three-storey townhouse. On the down-at-heel street, still largely occupied by industrial units, household rubbish and discarded mattresses litter the pavements, but the hipsters, creatives and artists have begun their stealthy takeover bid.

Guitarist Soroush (known as Looloosh) Farazmand, his brother and drummer Arash, bassist Koory Mirzaei and lead singer Siavash (known as Obash) Karampour, all in their mid-twenties, lived just a few doors down from The House of Yes, the fashionably edgy location for some of the city’s best warehouse parties.

The band occupied the lower apartment of the house, splitting the rent with a rotating group of other Iranian expatriate friends and acquaintances, including fellow musician and author Ali Eskandarian, 35, and 25-year-old artist Sasan Sadegpourosko, who lived upstairs.

The group saw themselves as an artists’ collective, and their home as “a refuge where we could pursue our dreams and make music together”, as well as throw house parties and host exhibitions of friends’ artwork.

Yesterday, however, the Yellow Dogs’ house was a bleak and grisly murder scene, cordoned off by yellow NYPD tape, two upturned skateboards still lying, wheels-up, outside the brown front door.

In the early hours of Monday morning, Ali Akbar Mohammadi Rafie, a 29-year-old fellow Brooklyn-based Iranian musician, carrying an assault rifle hidden in a guitar case, shot dead the Farazmand brothers and Eskandarian and wounded Sadegpourosko before turning the weapon on himself, committing suicide on the roof of the building.

It quickly emerged that Rafie had briefly been a member of the Yellow Dogs’ “sister band” Free Keys, with whom Eskandarian also used to perform.

The motive behind the triple murder and suicide remained murky until last night, when the surviving members of the band, Karampour and Mirzaei, released a statement, confirming an acrimonious dispute with Rafie.

“The transition between Tehran and New York was not without difficulties for Free Keys, whose bass player was unable to secure a visa in Iran. The band recruited a new member, Ali Akbar Mohammadi Rafie, ‘Rafi’, before coming to the States,” the statement read.

“By the third show in May 2012, Free Keys decided to stop working with Rafi as a result of personal and musical differences. It became clear he was not a natural fit within our group of friends, and his personal views conflicted with our approach to our art and to the world. A few months later, both bands severed ties with Rafi and in the 14 months since then, we’ve had no contact with him at all.”

As news of the shootings trickled out on music and social media sites on Monday, fans, friends and collaborators mourned the untimely end of an unusual and intriguing rock story.

“Everyone knows it was only a matter of time and the Yellow Dogs [were] going to be huge,” a friend told the New York Times. “That is why my heart is so broken — the idea that you left friends and family and love, and then for it to end in the way that it has, is just so unfair.”

“Three days later, we’re still here, still breathing but with a gaping hole in our hearts,” said Karampour and Mirzaei last night. “For now it’s impossible to imagine a future without our friends, and no explanation can make sense or begin to justify what has happened to our lives. To say we are heartbroken does not come close.”

The Yellow Dogs, whose musical influences included Joy Division and The Rapture, met in their late teens, in a Tehran park popular with punks, hippies, and skaters. They officially formed in the Iranian capital in 2007, though without the required approval from the government.

“For making any sort of art you have to get permission from the Ministry of Culture in Iran, so if you don’t have that it means that, somehow, you’re a criminal,” said Karampour.

“There are so many types of music that are illegal in Iran,” the late guitarist Soroush Farazmand recently told Vice magazine, in his last interview. “Any music with English lyrics or dance music, or with anything that’s against Islam… basically, anything that makes you feel good or happy is illegal.”

The punishments for performing such music in Iran range from passport confiscation to imprisonment but The Yellow Dogs refused to be censored by the authoritarian regime. “There’s a lot of bands that adapt their music and their lyrics but we didn’t want to do that,” Karampour said. “Our music is the music that you have to dance [to] and you have to feel the energy and feel the mood, and that’s why we decided to stay underground.”

Often literally: the band played in soundproofed basements and isolated warehouses, constantly dodging the police.

According to notes from a State Department cable from Istanbul, released by WikiLeaks, the Yellow Dogs were at the centre of “Tehran’s small but crazy underground club scene, where drugs are cheap and easy to find, creative expression is at its most free, and participants are among Iran’s most tech-savvy citizens”.

The police raided their concerts on several occasions, with one such incident leading to the detention of a band member on charges of “satanic worship”. A combination of bribes and parental pleading led to his eventual release two weeks later.

Crime scene: police outside the house in Brooklyn where two members of the band were killed

Almost as horrifyingly for a hipster band, there were run-ins with the law over “style and clothing immoralities”, including one band member’s afro hair, which the police forced him to cut off by seizing his driving licence until he did so. He complied, but then defiantly grew it back again, according to WikiLeaks.

When their activities were documented in No One Knows About Persian Cats, a film by the Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, which won the 2009 Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the musicians became objects of fascination to a growing army of new fans around the world, but also to the Iranian authorities.

“The government suddenly got very interested,” Karampour said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2011. “They made a TV series about musicians and said all these people are satanists and we have to execute them. So after we saw that stuff and after the film, we thought, ‘Man, we have to get out of the country’.”

The band played their first legal gig in Istanbul in January 2010, where they also sought visas at the US Embassy. The State Department cables discussing their application attest to the band’s obvious commitment and belief. “These astute, well-informed and resourceful twentysomething musicians offered an insightful glimpse — which we find credible — into a vibrant but mostly hidden subculture in Iran, reinforcing the impression that Iranian society spans a far broader and more complex spectrum than many outside observers realize,” the cable read.

The band’s own mission statement was far from lofty, however. “We don’t want to change the world, we just want to play music,” one band member told CNN.

Visas duly issued, they arrived in New York and began playing small venues around the city, and the prestigious South by SouthWest music festival in Austin, Texas, that spring. “We decided to live in Brooklyn because we knew our music would make more sense in New York, and this was a place we could grow,” said Soroush Farazmand in that final interview.

The Free Keys, with whom they had been collaborators since 2006, followed their friends to New York two years later, arriving in December 2011.

“Everything we had hoped and worked for was finally coming true ... the future was so incredibly bright,” said the two surviving members of The Yellow Dogs yesterday. “We are left with pain, emptiness and so many questions that won’t ever be answered. We wanted the world to discover us as we were: a community of musicians defined by our music, our friendships, our culture and our art. This is not the way we ever imagined the world would learn of our story.”